What Is the Biggest Thing in the Universe?

What Is the Biggest Thing in the Universe?

by Jamie Trosper

Discerning what the largest “thing” in the universe is much more difficult than it sounds. First, you must define what constitutes a “thing” since celestial objects could contain more than a single object that composes its whole.

Even when traveling at top speed on a commercial airplane, it usually takes several hours to travel from one continent to another, yet in just a fraction of a second, light can journey from one side of our planet to the other. Even that is still slow-moving when you consider just how vast space is, and how far light must travel to get from point a to point b (after all, it takes light four years to travel from Earth to the Sun’s closest neighbor: Proxima Centauri).

Simply put, large on our scale is almost infinitesimally small cosmically. Beyond our corner of the universe, there are numerous structures so large, they are beyond comprehension: from supermassive black holes, and supergiants, to clusters and superclusters.

In this video, Fraser Cain looks at the largest objects in the universe, and pits them against each other to crown the largest ‘thing’ in existence. Of course, he also examines how (or where, rather) we fit into the equation.